Instructure CMO Armin Molavi

ARMIN MOLAVI: You look at all the crazy things that have been going on in the agency world over the last few years. The agencies that are winning, the agencies that are growing, are the ones that have clients that are just waxing poetic about them. And that waxing poetic comes from doing —

GREG STUART: Because marketers all talk.

ARMIN: Yeah, we all talk. We all know who's doing really great work and who's really great to work with. And the agencies that consistently develop great campaigns, great ideas, that consistently show up as great partners are the ones that win. There's no magic behind it, it's just go to work every day and do great work.

GREG: Armin Molavi, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

ARMIN: Thanks Greg. Good to see you.

GREG: Yeah, a long time. Long time since we've caught up here. Yeah, no, it's great. And we haven't really talked that much, I don't think, since you have the new gig, so I'm super excited to get into that.

ARMIN: Yes, it's been a busy eight months, so lots to catch up on.

GREG: Listen, I think we'd like to catch the first-time CMOs as they're really navigating through the new company and the dynamics of that. So I'm sure you've got tons of wealth of information [and] inside perspective from having done that now.

ARMIN: It's been a lot of learning in the last eight months, especially since this is my first B2B gig, actually.

GREG: Oh, is it? Oh, I don't know that I realized that versus the stuff you did Havas or Hilton or any of the others, right?

ARMIN: Yeah, 25 years of B2C, and this is my very first B2B gig, so I've been learning a lot. It's been a fire hose. What's the saying? Like drinking from a fire hydrant? It's been a lot of that. It's been great, though.

GREG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and also to your PE back[ground], so they're relatively kind of ... You don't have to acknowledge this one. You don't have to ... Well, you did already. I was going to say, they must be kind of demanding environments, let's say. And listen, that's what we're going to talk about today, a little bit about working with PE.

ARMIN: Yeah, absolutely.

GREG: Yeah, because important, a lot of marketers, a lot of my board members are looking at that kind of thing. Hey, but Armin, let's go back here.

GREG: So first off, just tell 'em about the company, make sure they're very clear on what you guys are doing, what it's all about, because I don't know if everybody recognizes the name.

ARMIN: So the company's name is Instructure. We own a number of educational products, but the one that most people know is actually called Canvas, which is a learning management software platform that powers your educational experience either at a high ed or K-12 institution. We are the global market leader. We have all the Ivys. If you have kids that are either in high school or college, they know Canvas.

GREG: Yeah, no, I've heard it with my kids before, so I've just got one who's still doing it. So what's the problem that it's solving for people, by the way? And then I want to talk a little bit about what it means to kind of sell into that or market to that environment, I would say. Yeah.

ARMIN: Yeah. What's interesting is ... There's a couple elements. I think one, obviously the idea of having many elements of school be online is number one. Like how do we enable a digital education for students? Even if you are going to a traditional K-12 or traditional high ed, there are still obviously elements that educators are going to want to do to leverage digital experiences. So we have products that allow educators to deploy videos as a part of the syllabus and they can stop and start the videos, they can insert quizzes in the videos. The other thing that is really fascinating about the way our tools work is we've gotten to the point where we're deploying a lot of functionality that is creating a digital quad of sorts. How do you let students interact with each other, interact with their professors? Because everything at this point, if you going college, everything that you do is through your LMS [learning management system]. Even as a professor myself, that's how I do all of my grading, all of my homework, all of the teaching, all of the assignments. So it is the cornerstone of your education experience now.

GREG: And I think what people might not recognize, I mean, this is not some small startup kind of thing. I'm not sure how much of this you can affirm or deny, okay, but I believe there was at one point a $2 billion transaction around this business. And then there was a ... Later on, PE stepped in and took it back out of the public markets for I think as high as 4.8 billion. That's probably public, right?

ARMIN: That number is public. Yes. So yes, the last transaction was a combination of a buyback from public shares as well as another PE firm. And now we are mostly owned by KKR.

GREG: I think you do tend to think of these as my local small school, but it's like, no, no, there's a lot of backing here to do this. And so essential too, because I've spent enough time having to watch/navigate my kids into a couple in and out of institutions or education institutions sounds more funny, but I should say educational locations or whatever we want to call that. There's real organization that needs to be brought to that and sort of support that process.

ARMIN: Yeah, it's fascinating, and especially if you're talking about students going in and out of institutions and transfers, we have a whole network of products that facilitate that process, called Parchment. So now what's really interesting is there used to be a huge component of students who transfer and lose tons of credit from work that they have done because the transfer process used to be so antiquated. And what's amazing about what Parchment has done is students are now transferring much more easily, they're finding the better institution that fits what they need, and they're not losing time, they're not losing credit the way they used to as they go from institution A to institution B. And so there's a lot of huge change that has happened in the education landscape even in the last five years after Covid. Obviously Covid was a big boom for the entire industry, but the way AI is now starting to change our platforms, the way we are starting to figure out how to deploy much better learning experiences for students, what's fascinating now is if you are teaching at an international nontraditional school, like a continuing ed program, all of our content can be translated into any language.

And so now you can literally run a class with students who have very different primary languages and still, all the discussions, all the classes, all the coursework, even if you put in videos, all the subtitling is all translated. And so it's pretty fascinating how you can run a class and it truly be a global classroom.

GREG: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I'm not really connected to education. I've seen enough of an experience even to continue ed. But here, lemme give ... Let's just give some context because I think it's going to be helpful here.

GREG: So listen, you are at some level sort of a classic agency guy, right? You did the agency thing, Digitas, I mean, great agencies, Digitas. Digitas, I think, is one of the best agencies ever, by the way. And I competed against them so I say that with all honor. But Digitas, Arnold, then you went to Havas eventually, right? But you also then ended up over at Hilton with our best friend, Kellyn Kenny.

ARMIN: I did. Kellyn and Amy Martin Ziegenfuss, Noha Abdalla, some really fascinating, amazing people. Yeah, I was agency for 20 years.

GREG: Oh, I forgot Noha was there too.

ARMIN: Noha was there too. There was a huge crew.

GREG: CMO of Choice Hotels, CMO of AT&T, right, exactly, yeah.

ARMIN: And Amy's over at Carnival. So yeah, there's a lot of us that ... We had a really great team there at Hilton. It was a fascinating experience. Kellyn is a phenomenal leader, phenomenal mentor. I mean, there's just so much you can say about Kellyn.

GREG: She was my board chair here. One of the greatest experiences of my career was the opportunity to get to work for her, in essence, right? As CEO of the MMA, right? Yep.

ARMIN: Yeah. If I had to pay Kellyn rights to the things that she taught me, I would be in debt quite a bit because I am constantly quoting Kellyn in meetings and whatnot.

GREG: Now what's interesting, though, is that then ... Listen, you got caught at Hilton with the pandemic kind of bullshit. So the whole world kind of reshifted, but you ended up being becoming a fractional CMO largely for private equity, right? That's what you and I've talked about the last few years. So maybe just give some experience, exposure, at Instructure — if I can say that — for what does it mean to go work with PE companies if you're a marketing guy or gal?

ARMIN: Yeah, so after I left Hilton, it was right before the pandemic. Through a variety of introductions and whatnot, I started meeting a lot of private equity firms. And they have their portfolio of companies, and some of them need help. They would hire me to go fix the marketing departments, marketing strategy, marketing teams. In some situations, I would partner with the head of marketing. In some situations, I became the head of marketing. But what's so interesting about working with private equity is they do so much due diligence and so much research and so much forecasting in all of the companies that they may or may not acquire, that once they do acquire something, they have a very clear idea as to what are the growth drivers, what are the growth mechanisms. The best part about it is, the minute you can really get under the hood of what that due diligence was and really understand what they saw as the potential in these companies, you as a marketer can get very focused on how do I deliver that growth? How do I validate? And in some situations find other answers or find different answers of that investment hypothesis.

You're not necessarily spending massive amounts of time looking for white space, which obviously is a huge, and quite frankly, really interesting part about being a marketer sometimes. But some of the companies that I was working with, I would show up and you would dive deep into the investment hypothesis of the PE firm. They had a very clear roster of these are the drivers of hockey stick growth, and this is the way that we think we're going to hit our growth targets. And so you as a marketer can really now focus in on what was that customer need, what is that opportunity? How do you win? And how do you create the right value proposition to achieve that growth? Because the other thing to remember is, most private equity firms are not buying companies for single-digit growth. They are buying for big double-digit growth. And so there's a lot of potential, there's a lot of excitement, and there's also a lot of energy around it. I think a lot of private equity gets a bad rap. And look, there's obviously some private equity firms that buy companies and break them apart. And there's no question, and I'm not going to get into that.

GREG: They're financial engineers, right? Exactly.

ARMIN: Right. But here's the thing: If a private equity firm is telling their CEO, You need to fix marketing, come talk to our friend Armin, they're looking for growth. They're looking to make stuff happen. And that's the really exciting part for me about working with PE.

GREG: Yeah, I mean I think that's the funny thing. I mean, I think PE is very ... Listen, I'm more of a venture guy than I am ... I have a lot of background in venture, but there's some different but similar dynamics there. But you're right, a PE is going to come in and they're going to do one of two things, either how do I increase the multiple? How do I make this thing more valuable in the public markets when I take it back out? Or how do I produce revenue? And I think for that, it's often growth rate is really just to your point. Yeah. I think that's what a lot of people don't understand. So you better have a good ... But I love your point too, that in essence, they're a bunch of really smart business people, hopefully with a lot of experience, often sometimes in the domain in which they're playing, they tend to sometimes buy categories similar, right? They'll stick with that.

ARMIN: Absolutely.

GREG: They'll find a game plan — or a playbook, I should call it — and they'll try to repeat that in different companies. And so you're right in some regards. You know what's funny about that, Armin, as I'm listening to you, I'm starting to think here, I go, do companies themselves not do that? I wonder.

ARMIN: You know, I think —

GREG: That's a funny one. I don't know if we should answer that question. I'm afraid for my members to say that, but I don't know. I wonder.

ARMIN: I will say it this way. This is the way I kind of look at it. There's a really healthy push and pull between the board of directors — the partner board for a company — and the leadership team.

GREG: Agreed.

ARMIN: And now the back half of my run as a fractional CMO, I worked on probably seven or eight different PortCos where I was very involved with the board. And every single one of them wants to get to the same goal. And everybody is open to really great debate. Are there times where our partners ask us to do stuff that we don't necessarily agree with? We more often than not actually go research and figure out what is the right answer. And when we come back and we're like, You know what guys? We looked at this and we really think this is the better way to do it, the great PE firms — which I think I'm very fortunate to be working with some of them — are open to that.

GREG: KKR? You think? Yeah, but go ahead. Let's be clear. (laugh)

ARMIN: I mean, look, KKR ... The folks at KKR are phenomenal. They're really smart people. And the funny thing about the PE firms that I've had the opportunity to work with, they embody one of the skills that I always used to say about the best clients when I was on the agency side, which was the best clients are the really, really smart clients, but they also know what they don't know. And they're open about it.

GREG: Yeah.

ARMIN: And I think that I've had so many conversations with partners at all of these PE firms, and, especially when we get into some of these topics around branding or customer segmentation or funnel management, we get to a certain point and they say, You know what? You're the expert. This is where I'm tapping out. You make the right decisions. And that's the best thing. As a leader, what more could you ask for?

GREG: It's funny you say that. I think that's very true. So I've known a lot of public company CEOs, a lot of 'em have been my friends over the years. And a number of them have had to take their companies back private, out of the public markets. And the way that those who would tell me the truth — my closer friends — would always say, I needed to untangle this spaghetti mess that we had created in the company. And I don't mean that disrespectful. I don't think anybody's trying to do the wrong thing. But when you're a public company, you got to make the right decision, and then the investors have to believe. And so you're always kind of zigging and zagging and trying to figure it out, and you can end up with this sort of just spaghetti mess. Again, that makes it sound like somebody did something wrong. It just happens.

ARMIN: It just happens.

GREG: And you've got to pull it out. And then the PE guys say, No, okay, let's get really focused, get rid of that, get rid of that, get really focused. This is what we're doing. And that alignment is a very big deal and super helpful for you as a marketer too, because that's where you get wrong when the board says this and the CEO said this and the CFO ... Oh my god, Armin, I heard the craziest thing. I won't name names on this. I had a CFO of a billion-dollar-revenue company, CFO told his CMO, he says, you must use last-click attribution as your measurement metric. And I told the CMO in that case, I says, listen, I am a qualified measurement expert. In fact, I'm probably one of the best marketing measurement people out there. I says, I have no problems talking to your CFO and tell 'em that's the dumbest effing thing I've ever heard.

ARMIN: Yeah. Well, I think, look, I completely agree with you.

GREG: But that's what happens.

ARMIN: But that's what happens. And I think that when you're on the public company side, and also private company. I've worked for a lot of privately owned companies, not PE-backed. If you don't have a really good mechanism, whether it's OKRs or whatever, to not only focus the company but enable people in the company to say no to certain things and have everyone tie back to those OKRs, you do get that spaghetti that you're talking about. And Hilton was a great company for a lot of reasons, Kellyn and the rest of my friends being one of them, but Chris Nassetta really knows how to run that company with a tight set of OKRs and keep everyone focused and keep everyone on point. And I think because Chris has been so good about that process there at Hilton for years now, you don't have that spaghetti there. And I think every company can get there. It's just a matter of having the focus and the commitment to this is how we're going to keep things tight and this is how we're going to keep things honest across the company.

GREG: Yeah, yeah. Listen, congratulations. Like I said, a lot of my board members have a secret conversation with me about how do they get into PE. So congratulations, you successfully did that. I had a number of others, some still looking to do, so we'll see.

GREG: Okay, so Armin, listen, let's get to kind of the first question here of Building Better CMOs. Bob Pittman said at one of my events, he says, the only advantage to getting older is pattern recognition. And I think some of that pattern recognition comes from sort of advice you've been given over the years and sort of playing out some of those theses. And I'm sure there's good advice you've given. Maybe we'll get into that. But over the course of your career, what is some of the best advice you've ever been given? As you look back and go, wow, that really changed things, that shifted my perspective on it, what do you think it was?

ARMIN: I think from the best advice from an agency mentor is probably Sasha Savic. Sasha was —

GREG: Who's Sasha? Yeah. Who is he?

ARMIN: Sasha was chief operating officer, chief strategy officer at Havas while I was there, but then he went on to GroupM to be CEO over there for a while. And there was one day we were talking about how are we going to hit our revenue targets and obviously the usual conversations around agency, how are we going to be successful? And I just remember all of us being in a room and everyone's talking about all these different things and we got to do this and we got to do that, and what if we change the margin of profile over there? And Sasha just kind of stopped the conversation and said, we just have to do really great work for clients. And he said it just so matter of factly and so simply, and it's so funny because you look at all the crazy things that have been going on in the agency world over the last few years. The agencies that are winning, the agencies that are growing, are the ones that have clients that are just waxing poetic about them. And that waxing poetic comes from doing really —

GREG: Because marketers all talk.

ARMIN: Yeah, we all talk. We all know who's doing really great work and who's really great to work with. And the agencies that consistently develop great campaigns, great ideas, that consistently show up as great partners are the ones that win. There's no magic behind it. It's just go to work every day and do great work. And it's just stuck with me for so long. And I show up to Instructure now with the team, and there's always these debates around should we do this, should we do that? The attribution, the pipe, etc. And I just keep saying to everybody, we just have to do great advertising. We just have to do great marketing and all the good things will come.

GREG: I don't know if this will matter to you, Armin, but I think about the MMA business. I'm a member-based business. You kind of sometimes, too, end up becoming ... Everybody tries to be ... Here's the challenge with the agency business. Everybody's focused on trying not to lose the client's business.

ARMIN: Right.

GREG: And I have a thing I tell people here, I says, listen, you cannot let anybody at a member company — here's my point for MMA — you can't let anybody at a member company screw up our relationship in trying to help them. And so what my point is that I sometimes see companies that get politics, they'll do other things or they'll make funny sort of decisions. And I say, you need to break through that and find the person who's going to care about what we're doing and really get to them. So I wonder if a part of what you're kind of communicating too is that, listen, you got to get the client to do the right work. You got to get them to believe. Sometimes it's doing good work, but it feels like there's even another step on that sometimes I wonder, I don't know.

ARMIN: Yeah. I mean, look, I would say a couple things. One, that comment that you made of agencies are always worried about losing a client. My push — and going back to Sasha — is don't worry about losing them. Just worry about doing great work. If you just focus on doing great work, you're not going to lose them. To your point on that, being a good client, the funny thing about me having been solo for five years, I had a lot of people call me, a lot of marketers, client-side marketers, call me and say, I just don't know what to do about my agency. I think I want to change my agency. And the thing that I've always pushed everyone is to say, you've got to really be very introspective about are you a good client? If you're not a good client, the best agency in the world is not going to create good work for you. And I think that ... I had one CMO hire me to effectively become some kind of therapist between her team and the agency team, because she didn't want to fire them, but it wasn't working. And I met with everybody, I met with all the leaders on the agency side, I met with all the leaders on the brand side, and it was just very obvious that the relationship had gone sideways, that the way they were communicating with each other had gone sideways. There were all these crazy reply-all emails and this and that, and they weren't really talking.

GREG: What'd you do?

ARMIN: So when I went back to her and I gave her a readout of this is what I heard from all the stakeholder interviews, it was so amazing. She stopped and she looked at me and she said, We are probably doing this with all of our agencies. And coincidentally, I had actually happened to talk to one or two of the other ones. And I was like, actually, you are.

GREG: What were they doing, Armin? Can you say? I mean we haven't ... Don't disclose names here so we can talk about what happened.

ARMIN: They weren't being ... One big one was the client side wasn't aligning on objectives and goals before they brought in the agency. Cross-functionally, there wasn't clear alignment, partially because they didn't want to try and do it themselves. They were like, oh, maybe they were naively hoping that the agency would solve their problems. The agency can't solve problems on the client side when they don't have good decisions.

GREG: Correct.

ARMIN: So I think that was just one of the bigger ones. And because of that, no one felt invested. There were big creative presentations. The clients would literally email feedback to the agency and it was an email with everybody on it. All the clients kept hitting reply-all. I mean, it was —

GREG: (laugh)

ARMIN: And the thing was, they are great people, that agency team, the client team, they're great people. And the funny thing about all of it, we went through it, I gave everybody all the feedback, coached them for probably another four or five months. This was three years ago. They're still together.

GREG: Yeah, great.

ARMIN: And I think that's the key. The agency, the agency's got to be a great partner, The client has got to be a great partner, because otherwise the work isn't going to be good, no matter what.

GREG: I like that. I like that there's sort of a focus of how do we get back to work together. I mean, to your point, it sounds like there's a little bit of marriage couples therapy going on and that kind of thing that you're trying to untangle a little bit.

ARMIN: I think a lot of CMOs need to start thinking about some kind of couples therapy before they go into an RFP, because if you really like the agency, look, changing agencies is not easy. Looking for new agencies is not easy.

GREG: No, no.

ARMIN: Especially with a great shop. You've got your systems. I really do think that there's so much that can be fixed. So yeah, and now that I'm on the client side, it's so interesting. We had — actually this morning — we had our first big meeting with one of our media partners, and I briefed them on our brand strategy. I briefed them on where we're going. I briefed them on our roadmap, and the media lead, towards the end, he was like, it's so great that you are sharing all of this with us, obviously under NDA, etc., etc. But I said to him, I was like, How can you possibly be my best partner possible if I don't share these details with you? And I spent so much time on the agency side and clients wouldn't share all the details. I think it's holding a lot of these client agency relationships back, as well as client media partner. Same thing.

GREG: You know what I'm thinking about here as I listen to you a little bit, you know we've done a lot of marketing org work. We've been working on that for 10-plus years with a team of professors led by a guy named Dr. Omar Rodriguez, an ex Coca-Cola guy, and thinking some of that through. And it's interesting, the thing that we know drives success, the things to do in a marketing org that improve sales, like we've done the analysis — or the professors did, to be fair — tied it to Sundar, Dr. Sundar Bharadwaj did this work, probably one of the best finance-oriented marketing professors out there. And two of the things that mattered most was a sense of shared mission, which is a variation of what you were just saying there. That's what I heard as you talked about it, that we're not aligned in the same way so what are we out to accomplish? And by the way, we have found consistently when we go in and work with a company, work with a marketer — and just for the listener, we're not a consultancy, we're trying to solve bigger problems than that as the MMA — but as a sense of shared mission. And also too, what's funny, is a sense of psychological safety —

ARMIN: Absolutely.

GREG: That people haven't ability to express. Yeah. I hope the listener could see how your eyes just roll on that one. Exactly.

ARMIN: Absolutely. I mean, I think the shared mission and vision quite first of all actually doubles back to that conversation we were just having earlier about my PE partners and whatnot. But also the safety piece, making sure that everybody knows that they can speak up, that they can swing for the fences, that they can share big ideas that could be gambles and not have a repercussion from it is so critical. And I think it's even more important in this remote hybrid world that we're living in, because creating that kind of safety, when you have this screen in between all of us and you're not physically with people and you're not seeing body language and you're not seeing the quiet people in the room the way we used to in conference rooms, being able to see that person that you're like, oh, you know what? So-and-so in the corner usually has big ideas, but they're being quiet right now. I want to know why they're being quiet. Creating that environment where people feel comfortable to speak up is so critical.

GREG: I think this also gets to the whole nature of not working together as much as we used to. I wonder what damage we're doing around that. I can't believe it's good for us at the end of the day,

ARMIN: I think, look, we are a fully remote company. We do have a headquarters in Salt Lake City. What I have realized is you can't just take on the benefits of remote work, right? There's tons of benefits.

GREG: What does that mean?

ARMIN: So think about it. What are the great things about working remote? Flexibility, I can wear pajamas to work in the morning, whatever it may be. There's also a flip. The flip to it is you have to find ways to spend more time with people one-on-one.

GREG: Agreed.

ARMIN: You have to understand which are the kinds of bodies of work that you still need to physically get together for. And when those projects come up, you got to make it happen. Six or seven weeks ago, I was working with something with my chief product officer, and Shiren and I were looking at each other, we were on Zoom, and I can't remember who it was, one of us were like, we just got to get in a room. And we looked at our calendars, we were like, yep, Monday. And so I trained down to New York. One of our colleagues flew in, four hours in a WeWork and we banged out so much work.

GREG: Love it.

ARMIN: And it was amazing.

GREG: Love it. Love it, love it, love it.

ARMIN: You have to be open to that. When Sharon and I were looking at calendars, he was like, oh, Monday would work. But he was like, oh, but I can't travel. I was like, yep, I'll come down. Not a problem. You have to have that flexibility. You have to have that openness to say, yep, Monday might not have been a great day for me to go to New York, but we needed it to happen. You also have to have the thoughtfulness of where to take advantage of opportunities. I want to say five of our EC members were going to a meeting in New York last week. I knew I needed to have a brainstorm with four of 'em, and I tagged them all in a Slack, and I was like, Hey guys, if I come down before your meeting —

GREG: Can we get time?

ARMIN: Can we have a three-hour brainstorm? And everyone obviously had to rearrange their schedules in the morning, but it was the right thing to do. And so that's what I mean by you got to do both sides of it. Another thing that we do as a company is when the EC team gets together, one of the dinners is always public for all of the employees at our company that are in town.

GREG: Ohh.

ARMIN: If we have a leadership team meeting in Boston, we always free up one night so that all the Boston employees can come to cocktails and dinner with us. You have to have that mindset. You got to think about these elements to counteract the not-ideal parts of working remote.

GREG: Got it, got it. Hey, Armin, I want to move on to something else, but you know what, you'd given me some prenotes, and you mentioned that Kellyn Kenny had given you advice. So I would be remiss, given what fandom I have for her and you too, that we didn't just hear, what was the advice she gave you?

ARMIN: Yes, Kellyn is an amazing human being. When I was leaving Hilton, it was our very last day, my last day in D.C., and I didn't know what I was going to do. And we were having dinner and it was just one of those fabulous, great dinners. And she was like, What are you going to do? And I was like, I don't really know, Kellyn. And she looked at me and she said, No matter what you do, you have to either build something or create or fix something.

GREG: Or fix something, yeah.

ARMIN: I didn't really know what she was getting at. And she started to say to me, You know, Armin, when I look back at your three years here, I think about some of your biggest wins at Hilton. And all of them fit that mold. All of them fit that mold of you being great at building stuff, figuring out problems that we had and fixing those problems. The minute I ran out of — and she truly said this to me — she said, the minute I ran out of big things for you to build or fix, I could tell that you were starting to get bored.

GREG: (laugh) So she was giving you personal advice. This is not her general advice. This is like, that's what's great about her. She looked into you and said, this is what you need to do.

ARMIN: Yes. So next time you see Kellyn, she will tell you this is true. After that, I had, in the five years that I was working solo, I had 32 clients, 31 of them fit the mold of fix or build.

GREG: Yeah, there we go.

ARMIN: The one that didn't is my only one that went sideways.

GREG: (laugh)

ARMIN: It's the only one that went sideways. And I have gotten a lot of lovely compliments about the practice that I built.

GREG: You know what? There's almost just good advice in that though. For anybody coming into a company, if you're trying to figure out what you do, don't show up to do your job. Show up to fix something or build something. Fix something or build something, everybody. Either you're fixing the problems or you're building something bigger for the company on its behalf, not just for the sake of doing it, but that's better. So that's why I like that advice.

ARMIN: It suits my personality. It suits my brain. The amazing part of Kellyn is how ... One of the amazing parts of Kellyn is how she really spends enough time with her team to really understand each of us at such a primal core level to give that kind of advice.

GREG: Totally, totally. Okay, so Armin, let's get into the real fun here for Building Better CMOs. So listen, you've been on the board of the MMA, you know what we're about as a nonprofit, we're here to fix stuff. My job is to make the industry better for CMOs and marketers. And the whole thesis of this thing was to build an alliance of even Meta and Google and all the platforms and all the ad tech, mar tech companies to come together to support the marketers in being stronger and better. So as you look out over the work you've done, and I don't know if you want to pick from the current company, go back to others, you want to pick on, I dunno where you want to go. You'll go anywhere you want. What do you think that marketing or marketers either don't appreciate, could do better, should focus more attention on, maybe neglect, maybe just don't even understand, I don't care where you go with the thing, but give me an area for ... And maybe MMA can help, maybe not, I don't know, that doesn't matter. But what do you think needs to really change for marketing marketers?

ARMIN: So earlier you said that some people want to get into PE. So I'll give you an answer that answers your question and talks about PE in one fell swoop. My very first PE-backed company, I was working with them, it must've been like eight weeks in. And the CEO says to me, This is the board agenda. Here's your slot. Great, fine. Created all the content, ready to go. Go to the meeting, present everything, and there was this one big problem that the company was dealing with, and I had laid out a plan to fix all this stuff. And the partner in the meeting, he had started asking me a bunch of questions, and I answered, great. He called me that night, complete [surprise], I didn't even know ... He must've gotten my phone number from the CEO.

He calls me that night. And he was like, you know what, Armin, that was amazing. So thoughtful. And you explained everything to us in English, not using crazy marketing terms.

GREG: (laugh)

ARMIN: And you connected all of the things that you're doing to all of the main drivers of the business in our investment thesis. And the thing that I am struggling with, moving into a B2B company for the first time,

I don't know all the B2B lingo. I'm still learning it. And I'm like, guys, can't we just speak English? Why are we not being clear to the rest of our partners in the company around why are we doing all of these things? Because when everyone else understands why we are doing what we are doing and understands how it's impacting the key elements and the key drivers of growth at this company, everyone will be happy. Everyone will feel good about the work that marketing is doing. And I really think that too many CMOs and too many marketing teams try to be too fancy in all these presentations and conversations, and they don't get alignment cross-functionally. And without that alignment, you're dead in the water. And I just think we got to let go of the lingo. We got to let go of all this nonsense.

GREG: Get rid of the nonsense. So what's on your list? Give me, give me the top list of stuff we should stop using in conversations with board members or CEOs.

ARMIN: I think that it's funny you were talking about last-click attribution, I explained multimix modeling and MTA to one board member just in the simple terms of basketball assists and goals. And they were like, oh, yep, great. This whole thing about multitouch attribution and weighting benefit and allocating performance. You don't need to explain it that way. You just don't. The way we talk about primary research, conjoint analyses, it's just so overwrought with lingo. I think that we're in the process right now of creating synthetic users with AI to test creative.

GREG: We've done some ... MMA has done some work around that. We should help you. But go ahead. Yeah.

ARMIN: All we did was, we just used the language of the company. We created AI agents that replicate our customers and everyone's like, oh, great. Synthetic personas? What does that even mean? I don't even know what the phrase ... If I'm not a marketer, I don't know what that is. And so it's just that kind of stuff that I think we need to get rid of.

GREG: It's funny, you kind of hit on the fourth of the things that marketing org work the professors have discovered, which is around operating clarity, which I think is a variation what you're saying right now. Can you give me an example of how that played out in any one of the ... I don't know, you can go nameless on the company so you can speak freely. So I don't know if you want to make it about Instructure or you want to make it about somebody else from before, but what do they need to get? What do you try to push to? How do you filter either your PowerPoint presentations? I mean, that's a way to look at that. What do you do? Or do you have rules of the road? I dunno. Go after that in some regard.

ARMIN: First of all, I actually don't do that many PowerPoint presentations with my colleagues.

GREG: Okay, okay, fair enough. Maybe that's a bad example right now.

ARMIN: No! No, but I think that's part of it, Greg. We presented a new brand strategy and I just laid out, This is why we need a new brand strategy. This is what I think a new brand strategy is, what it's going to do for us. And it was no slides. It was just a conversation with the rest of the EC team, and then we showed them the work and that was it. I don't need to do this big song and dance. Keep it simple. We keep saying that — keep it simple, stupid — in all of these campaign ideas, but we don't take our own advice.

ARMIN: And I think the other one is this whole thing about the black box of MMM and MTA. I think that the way we try to explain it is so complicated. And the problem with not explaining MMM or MTA really well to the team upfront is when you do all the work and the analysis is done and it starts making recommendations, if you don't understand how they got to the recommendations, no one's going to believe the recommendations. And so you want to sit here and say, oh, we did this MMM model and it says if we put this much more money into paid search, it's going to pump out this much more return. Well, that's all fine and good, but if I don't understand how you got to the analysis, I'm not going to give you that money.

GREG: Hey, Armin, I'm going to take a real chance on something here. You ready? So I don't know if you know I cofounded multitouch attribution.

ARMIN: Oh, I know.

GREG: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Just fyi. Okay, so this is one of those I know too much. Okay. So what is the difference between MMM and MTA?

ARMIN: For me, the way I talk about it is, MMM looks at your entire marketing mix, including upper and lower funnel, including offline media, whereas MTA, I focus it specifically on digital.

GREG: Okay. Okay. Okay. But MTA can do nondigital.

ARMIN: Yeah, MTA can do nondigital. I think that MMM, I would look at MMM for different solutioning.

GREG: Correct. They can give you a sense of increased opportunity in the marketplace because it's a top-down analysis where an MTA is a bottoms up. It's basically taking each user's exposure to media, hopefully brand, it should take their brand out.

ARMIN: Absolutely.

GREG: And it should take their sales data or other activity and then roll that up into something. It just gives you a much finer level that you can get into. Whereas MMM be a little bit too — for me, in my experience — it can be a little too glossy over, and I don't get a lot of marketers really using MMM. Or those who have it, if you talk to the big CPG companies, they're all doing MMM, but none of them are using it because they go, well, I don't want to lose the budget so we just keep doing it, but they don't really know what they're doing with it. That's my challenge I find there.

ARMIN: Well, I think — and I do have a fair bit of CPG — I think the problem with ... Look, I think MMM solves different problems than MTA does. I think —

GREG: Yes, very much so.

ARMIN: You have to have —

GREG: And you shouldn't think they're doing the same thing. Exactly. That's one of the big problems.

ARMIN: They're absolutely not doing the same thing. I think that you have to have a very clear understanding of all your transactions to do MTA.

GREG: The complexity on MTA is really ... All that data.

ARMIN: You need that data. Interestingly, actually, I built an MMM analysis for a casino. The thing to remember is with casinos, you don't know every transaction. You don't know every bet every day.

GREG: Yeah. I don't know what the sale is.

ARMIN: You don't know what the sale is, right?

GREG: Right. Right.

ARMIN: Now, at an individual level, you do know in aggregate. I know how much money came in today. And now when you have that kind of aggregated data, you can't do it with MTA, but you could do MMM.

GREG: So let's go back here. What's the fix though, Armin? Again, I do the podcast, one, because I like to talk to my friends and I like to talk about marketing all the time, but also I got to go fix stuff. Is there a thing for me to go fix? Is there a thing for the MMA here to work on? And some of the things that you've talked about, this reducing the jargon, and I don't want to overly simplify it, but it's sort of talking in business terms. It's connected to business terms, which we don't do a very good job of.

ARMIN: I think that's the big one. I think it's connecting to the business objectives.

GREG: We don't talk about enterprise value.

ARMIN: Correct.

GREG: In my experience. Right.

ARMIN: And I think that when you look at an investment hypothesis from a PE firm that's bought a company, they've got a very clear timeline. They've got a very clear set of drivers. They know what's going to impact top line, they know what's going to impact bottom line.

And once you start deconstructing those drivers, I can very easily look at those drivers and say, you know what? That one has nothing to do with marketing, that one marketing can absolutely drive, and these are the ways marketing can impact the other ones. And from there, show the measurable, repeatable metrics that marketing can drive that ladder into those. You can very easily start creating a dashboard of marketing metrics that very well, very cleanly tie to that PE investment hypothesis. And that's what everybody wants to see. One of the things that I built for a number of my companies and boards is just a basic traffic light dashboard. But here's the thing, because I have proven to everybody how these different metrics ladder into those drivers, everyone's perfectly happy with the dashboard. We start the meeting, and the only thing we talk about are the yellows and reds.

GREG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ARMIN: And that's it.

GREG: But Armin, let me ask you a question though. Sometimes, though, it gets into brand, and brand is kind of an amorphous concept in particular for finance types, [it] can be. So how do you have a conversation with stitching brand to enterprise value and/or stitching lower funnel... ? Now you're in B2B, so I'm not sure if that applies. I don't know. How do you think about that a little bit?

ARMIN: I'm thinking about it both here at Instructure as well as other companies is ... Brand is a combination. The way I look at brand is that it's the amalgamation of the way consumers see your company in the context of the category. And I think about asking customers, what are the most important drivers of decision in this category? Rank them, give them priority, and then ask everybody, what do you think of us as it relates to those drivers as well as our competitors? And if you can set that up, which is not that hard to do, especially now with all these new ways of sampling and whatnot, you can now deconstruct this idea of brand or brand awareness or brand preference into, oh, I want my LMS to be cutting-edge. I want my LMS to be easy to use. I want my LMS to be these things. And once I now have deconstructed it into those attributes, and I can say to people, oh, we're underperforming on these attributes with these stakeholders, I can now say to everybody, we're doing campaigns against those specific weak points. And now I don't have to talk about brand anymore.

I just look at everybody and say, this is about driving preference. This is about driving those attributes. And so it's no longer amorphous.

GREG: And you're not necessarily allocating budget. I mean, it's still hard to say, should we spend 5 million, 10 million, a hundred million, whatever the story might be. But at least you sort of put the focus on the thing. And until you see those metrics move, you should keep spending is kind of what you're saying.

ARMIN: Absolutely. And I think you can prove, look, I think that there are ways that you can prove that campaigns in the moment are likely to move those metrics. And I think there are ways that you can create leading indicators. And once you've got that and you've shown the math, if you will, that amorphous nature of brand again gets kind of neutralized. Look, I don't need my CFO to become a brand expert. I need my CFO to be confident that when I invest these dollars and I invest these resources, that it's going to move those metrics that they understand.

GREG: Hey, I don't know if you've ever heard me say, I have one board member or CMO — I've stated publicly who it is, we won't get into it here — but he says he never uses the term "brand." He talks about maximum multi-year returns. And his point is, because who doesn't want that? Whereas "brand" is a funny concept for, I mean, most business people are familiar enough with the concept of brand, although it's still esoteric to them at many levels if you don't do it right.

ARMIN: I think it's the measurement of it. And I think it's the, like, how does my CEO know that I'm improving the brand? That's the esoteric part.

GREG: And where it gets complicated is that ... You said you'd operate in CPG, where some of the challenges are to that, some of these companies have such high brand, it's very hard to move those metrics over time. So I'm not sure if you really know what they mean anymore. So it's gotten extra complicated.

ARMIN: And I think that with those, especially with the high-velocity CPGs, the question becomes how do you find the right dataset that is updated frequently enough so that you can have confidence that you're making the right choices? I mean, for example, when we were working on P&G, we were getting a daily feed from Walmart on transactions. And because Walmart was like 30% of our total volume at that time, I could easily use that as a data point. Now the question is, how do you correlate that to all the activities? And that's where you get into MMM, MTA, all sorts of things.

GREG: How do you deal with ... What's the difference between B2B versus B2C? Yeah. Oh boy, I got a reaction there.

ARMIN: Here's the thing. It's not. I think that everyone wants to make all of these stories about how it's dramatically different. At the end of the day, I have to convince people that if they give up their budget for what I have to sell, it's going to make their life better at work. That's what marketing is. Hey Greg, I've got this mouse. If I sell it to you, it's going to make your life better. That's all it is. Are there other complications? Sure. Longer buying cycles, multiple stakeholders. Sure. But you have to understand the audience, have empathy for their pain points, understand how your product is going to solve those, and connect the dots.

GREG: Yeah.

ARMIN: It's not that different. I really, it's —

GREG: We should write down that framework and just give it to every marketer. There's a little plaque on their desk right there. Right, exactly. I like your point too there. It's funny, I don't ... You kind of caught me there off guard, like empathy for their pain points. I'm like, Ooh, do I have empathy for my marketers? Yeah, I think I do. I've got to think that through a little bit, right?

ARMIN: I just think that people ... Everybody has something that could be better. And when you spend the time to really understand what's important to them and understand the pain that they have, first of all, right out of the gate, it feels good that someone cares. And second of all, it's great that someone took the time to understand me. Awesome. I'm ready to listen to you.

GREG: There you go. Okay. Okay. A few lightning round questions. You ready, Armin?

ARMIN: Let's do it.

GREG: I'm going to modify the first one a little bit. What did you not understand about the CMO role until you got there?

ARMIN: What did I not understand about it?

GREG: Yeah, what did you think, Ooh, that kind of caught me off guard. I didn't kind see that coming. I mean, I know what it was when I first became a CEO. I'm very clear what happened around that. But I'm curious, as you look back when you started becoming CMO, because you moved from Hilton, where you were the head of media there, right? To then eventually becoming sort of interim CMOs. Now you're a full-time CMO, so I don't know, I didn't understand that complexity.

ARMIN: There's a lot more business operations than I realized. It's been a long time since I took an accounting class at UMass.

GREG: (laugh)

ARMIN: I think that what's interesting, Greg, is I actually decided ... I don't have a master's degree. I was working at Digitas in the naughts. We were building websites for the first time. Why would I leave to go get an MBA program? And so now I've decided I'm going to go back and get my master's. I found a program that just is going to fill in these holes on behavioral accounting, corporate accounting, all the sorts of financial things that I just never did. And so I think those parts of it are a little bit bigger than I thought were going to be, and so I'm spending a lot of time there.

GREG: Okay. Another lightning round. Who do you most admire in marketing, past or present?

ARMIN: So I don't really think he considers himself a marketing person, but I'm going to say Simon Sinek is someone that I'm very ...

GREG: I knew that was your answer. So why? I mean, I think he's great. What do you think? Who is he, just in case the listener doesn't know?

ARMIN: For those of you who don't know, he's a influencer, he's an author, thought leader. Simon ... the way he talks about empathy and humanity. You're going to find his content on TikTok or Reels or wherever, and he talks about understanding people. He talks about ... There's this one thing that I saw him talk about, whenever you as a human being just are in a bad spot, all someone needs is just eight minutes with a friend. Eight minutes with a friend can be hugely impactful to just the state of your brain and your mental psyche. He talks about this concept, and it just brings me back to Maslow and it brings me back to hierarchy of needs. You got to understand people at the base. You got to understand what they really need and work your way up. Just the way he talks about it is just very inspiring to me.

GREG: He's the author — I don't know if actually the book is called that — but he's the architect of the concept "Why."

ARMIN: Yes. Yeah.

GREG: That's what he's really known for. Yeah. No, I think he's phenomenal. I love when he comes up on either my TikTok feed or YouTube or Reels or whatever, I always listen. Okay, last one. You're ready for this? Okay.

ARMIN: Yes.

GREG: If you were to give advice to a marketer, so today's Friday, Monday, right? So I don't know when people are listening, but let's just, if they're going to start doing something differently on Monday, what would that be?

ARMIN: As a marketer?

GREG: Yeah. If there's a bit of advice, if there's one thing you would tell marketers to listen to and some of what you said here today, maybe to summarize, what should they start doing differently on Monday. Do you know?

ARMIN: The one that's killing me most right now is how everyone keeps looking at AI as a reductionist tool. I think that everybody —

GREG: They're missing the point. They're missing it. I totally agree there, Armin.

ARMIN: This whole thing about —

GREG: This stupid efficiency thing, yes, it's great for efficiency, but you're missing the point. That's not the X factor, people.

ARMIN: Yeah.

GREG: Sorry. Sorry. I asked you to answer then I told you. Sorry. I spend a lot of time there. We spent so much time on efficiency, I can only cut 50% and even then I'm not really sure that I can get there.

ARMIN: That's what it is.

GREG: But I can 2, 3, 4 x. In fact, we know from ... Sorry. Now you really got me going.

ARMIN: But that's it, Greg. That's the thing. It's so funny. A couple of weeks ago, I was flying home from somewhere where it was this five hour flight. There was a gentleman sitting next to me. He was like late 20s. He was on email and Slack and whatnot the whole flight. It was, quite frankly, very impressive. And at the end —

GREG: You could have been sitting next to me, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

ARMIN: At the end, he put his laptop away, he started talking to me, and it turns out he has his own business and all this other stuff, and he started talking to me about AI. And he was like, yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to automate a lot of stuff with AI so that I can cut my workforce down from 12 to eight. And I looked at him and I was like, if you ask me, that is the exactly wrong thing to be doing with AI. You could see his face kind of like, oh god, this old guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I looked at him and I said, instead of thinking about how to get it from 12 to eight, why don't you think about how to get those 12 to do the work of 20? There's so much more that can always be done. I was so —

GREG: Exactly, Exactly.

ARMIN: You gotta ... There's so much more. There's so many better things to be doing. And I was very fortunate to spend some time with the product manager from OpenAI on ChatGPT, and he said to me, he has a not-to-do list. Whenever he is going about his day — professionally, personally, whatever — and he's doing something that he just finds annoying but that it has to be done, he writes it on his not-to-do list. And whenever he has time, he figures out how to get AI —

GREG: To do it.

ARMIN: To do it so that he doesn't have to do it anymore. And he's now taking that new freed-up time to do something else.

GREG: Whether they had the product of ChatGPT, of OpenAI, has a variation of that kind of thing. It's something like when they build a product, he's making a list to the side. I think is a variation of that.

ARMIN: Yeah, and that's the thing. That's the way I kind of look at it.

GREG: Here's why I think that's so dopey. This is what really bugs me about it. And I do this with my ... I have some CEOs who run their regions and I have them go through a business planning exercise. When we do business planning every year, I have them write, what are you going to do? What are you going to focus on? What's going on? Make me a list of five to 10 things you're not able to get to. And Armin, I'm telling you, if you do not have that list for me, that's not good. You had better because then I start to evaluate where you are and how ambitious and aggressive you are about this business. And by the way, I think that is somewhat a CEO's perspective. I don't know that I had that earlier in my career, so I want to caution that a little bit, although ... But yeah, no, I've got a very long list of stuff I'd give you to do if you just had more time, a very long list. And I'm not being a good business leader if I don't have that long list or work with the team to have that long list and then help to get focused, there's so many things I could do for my members that it's just hard to get to because of the restrictions of human capacity right now.

ARMIN: Yes. Right. And then the question becomes how do you broaden human capacity? How do you create more potential? How do you create more?

GREG: What I can't tell though, listen, I come from the age when we used to send, so I'm from the agency world where we used to send — you're probably not this old maybe — we used to send bicycle messengers, call the bicycle messenger to come pick up the form to do the typeface outside the company. They would do copy at some machine somewhere else because we didn't have computers in house to do it. I come back, I'm in the wayback machine, okay? But you think about how — and then we got the fax machines and so on — but you think about how far, how fast. I don't know if there's a breaking point to the speed at which we're starting to ask people to execute against. That's what I'm not sure. I wonder if there's a limit there maybe somewhere someday. I don't know.

ARMIN: It's interesting. I don't even know. I don't think it's about speed. I don't ask my team to go faster. It's not about going faster.

GREG: But you are doing different —

ARMIN: It's about creating efficiency.

GREG: It's about creating efficiency sometimes in the things that they do so they can get more done for the company. Listen, no company progresses if you don't. Well, but no company gets ... No company goes anywhere if you do not get shit done.

ARMIN: Totally.

GREG: Oh, I'm such maniacal here. My team would tell, I says, okay, did we agree to do that? Okay, great. Did we agree on timetable? Okay, did we get it done? And if not, then what are we doing to get it done? Because if you don't get it done, you're not creating any value. You have to get stuff done.

ARMIN: A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

GREG: Armin, I was so looking forward to doing it. It's so much fun.

ARMIN: Me too.

GREG: It's been get getting to know you. I know you and I had a bunch of great conversations. I still remember I was in a taxi in the back in Brazil. It was in the back of a taxi in Brazil talking to you about your PE thing. I remember we were talking about the KKR stuff ...

ARMIN: Oh yes.

GREG: Before you went to the job. I still remember, I realized the whole thing where it was, so I've really enjoyed this. I can't thank you enough.

ARMIN: Thank you for having me, Greg.

GREG: Thanks again to Armin Molavi from Instructure for coming on Building Better CMOs. Now check the description of this episode for links to connect with Armin. If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy my conversation with Andrea Bremmer, the chief marketing PR officer of Ally Financial. We talked about Ally's commitment to investing equally in men's and women's sports, the research MMA and Ally have done together to bring data into brand marketing, and what it takes to transition from account manager to marketing leader. You can find that episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're hearing me now. Now at the Marketing Media Alliance, we are working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research, and education. If you want to know more, visit mmaglobal.com. You can also email me directly, greg@mmaglobal.com. Now, don't forget, Building Better CMOs is now on YouTube. Just go to bettercmos.com/youtube to start watching. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase, and a very special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.